thinking about this really specific section of aeneid's book two and applying it to mince characters because that's what i do best (and also cannot write concisely for the life of me)
if you don't know the aeneid, it's the story of rome's mythological founder, aeneas (they were real creative with naming things back then. the odyssey follows odysseus. the aeneid folows aeneas. it's great) on his journey away from troy after its sack following the trojan war. this specific bit i'm talking about is from the sack of troy;
coroebus, a soldier, has the idea that he, aeneas and a few other soldiers should take the dotted around greek armour and dress themselves as greek soldiers to catch the greeks off guard and push them back. it doesn't really work, and almost all of them but aeneas and two other trojans are killed, with coroebus dying first at the altar of minerva;
"coroebus was the first to die. he fell by the right hand of peneleus and lay face down on the altar of minerva, goddess mighty in arms."
there are about three things that make this delightfully symbolic in my opinion
the first being, minerva is the roman equivalent of athena, the greek goddess of war, wisdom and handicraft. dying on her altar after losing a battle is a very special kind of tragic irony, especially if you throw in the fact that altars were used to make offerings to the gods. in exchange for throwing out one last hail mary to try and save his crumbling city, coroebus was instead offered to that same god he probably begged to save him.
second point, it was his idea. minerva is the goddess of wisdom. dying because of your own idea at the goddess of wisdom's knees is just. more salt in this already very very salty wound isn't it
and finally, this death sort of implies a disposability to coroebus's life
homeric texts - and subsequently the aeneid, because virgil took so much inspiration from homer it's quite literally a segment on our a level mark scheme - are infamous for having long lists of very long names that, eventually, one tunes out in the reading of the book. thousands of trojans, and greeks, are listed to have died in this war. so many, we lose interest in valuing individual lives. it likens human soldiers to the oxen they sacrifice in everyday life. they are replaceable
something about all of that just sticks with me
"dying", literally or metaphorically, at the deaf ear of who you consider help, because of something you came up with not quite working the way you thought it would, and then finally being reduced to a name in a poorly written list of others who faced the same fate...
horrid, really.
now, do me a favour, and apply all of that last paragraph to jean leslie
